Orders from Swaledale

Rupert Hart-Davis retired to Swaledale from the London publishing world two years before I joined it in 1965, so it was on the shelves of second-hand bookshops that his name first really registered with me. I often found myself spotting books which he had published before I could read his name on them, because in both design and production they had a distinct air of quality. And then, when I pulled them off the shelf, I often ended up buying them because they were to do with the Victorian era, a period that has always mesmerized me.

My first encounter with the man himself came about in 1974 when I had been working at John Murray for two years. I was looking after a correspondence between Max Beerbohm and the painter William Rothenstein, called Max and Will and edited by Mary Lago, an American professor of English. Mary had to approach Rupert about some points, for he, as the recent cataloguer of Max’s caricatures, was the acknowledged expert on all Beerbohm matters. Since she was in Missouri and I was only a cheap phone call away from Swaledale, it was I who had to sort them out with Rupert. When he came on the phone I was taken aback by the boom in his voice, before I diffidently read out the wording which I thought might solve the points raised. ‘Absolutely fine, old boy, you obviously know what you are doing. These American academics, they always grasp the wrong end of the stick and take things too literally.’ When I put the phone down I felt a little smug, a little defensive of Mary and more than a little surprised at the voice and the manner. How to square the bluff heartiness with the man I knew to be steeped in the hothouse world of the 1890s, as well as an enthusiast for much of the literature of the rest of that century? Later I learnt that Rupert had spent the war as the very effective adjutant of the Guards depot at Pirbright. That, for the time being, was that. But in 1977 Jock Murray returned from a jaunt to the north with a typescript, which he had been given by Rupert after lunch at Swaledale. It comprised a year’s worth of his and George Lyttelton’s letters to each other. Would I take a look because he was unsure about them and wanted the opinion of someone who was much younger, had not been at Eton and was not a cricket enthusiast? I fitted the description but cannot remember feeling more than mild curiosity at the prospect and a rather stronger doubt whether they could ever earn a penny, whatever their qualities. But like the many thousands of later fans, once I started reading I was swiftly addicted. Rupert’s wife June had typed the letters out uncut and uncensored so of course I tried to read the passages blacked out by him, but he had done the job too well. I recommended that we publish them. Though the tide might be running strongly against what must at first appear insider, establishment, élitist fare, the sheer excellence of so much in the letters would surely disarm most reviewers. Here was a last flowering of something vanishing if not already gone, which must be preserved and shared. And so the really quite simple publishing process began. Naturally the need for rewrites never arose. My suggestions for a few more cuts were brushed aside by Rupert, but at my urging he did come up with some more explanatory footnotes to help readers on their way. He insisted that the title on the binding case spine read horizontally – arule that he claimed he stuck to for all his books, so one didn’t have to twist one’s head to read a title on the shelf. Fine, but it also meant the title was so small that it couldn’t be read at any distance. How to indicate that this might be the first of a series, without the commitment of putting ‘Volume I’? Murray’s wise production director, Ken Foster, came up with a single gold asterisk. If another volume followed, it could have two, and so on. The jacket was a simple unlaminated lettering job, so there was nothing to argue about there. Typically the photograph of himself which Rupert came up with was out of focus, but he claimed it was the best on offer. The biggest worry was my blurb, but Rupert said he loved it and continued to wax lyrical over the succeeding five variations on it that I cranked out. Any hopes that he might get over his horror of London and come south for a launch party and some interviews were quickly knocked on the head. Approaches to Humphrey Lyttelton, George’s son, with the idea that he might help on that front, got nowhere either, and Rupert’s son Adam had yet to become a television personality. But the reviews displaced any peevish feelings left by this lack of cooperation. We had a succès d’estime, possibly even a minor classic on our hands, with more of the same to come. The typescripts of further years of correspondence arrived from Yorkshire and were turned into further volumes, but very, very seldom did Rupert appear at John Murray. I only saw him twice, and recall a general impression of breezy jocularity to go with the moustache and pipe, but much charm too. Inevitably there was an occasional flagging in the correspondence or an element of repetition as the years went by, but he remained stubborn over my editorial suggestions and impatient over any delay in the flow of proofs. Relations did not cease with the appearance of the last volume in 1984 because the following year Murray published More Letters of Oscar Wilde. This was something of a barrel-scraping exercise, bringing together those that had come to light since Rupert’s magisterial editing of The Letters of Oscar Wilde in 1962. I came up with what I thought was an interesting and little-known picture of Wilde for the jacket, which belonged to the dealers Wildenstein. But Rupert was having none of it: ‘It is more like Billy Bunter, and bears no resemblance to all the portraits and photos of Wilde. If you printed it anywhere in my book you would hold yourself up to hatred, ridicule and contempt.’ By the time Murray published Rupert’s Letters of Max Beerbohm in 1988 he was over 80 and it showed in the rough treatment he dished out during the process. Philip Ziegler, in his outstanding biography of Rupert, records that in answer to one complaint, I scribbled on the letter before passing it to Jock Murray: ‘Let us speak on Friday as to what to do with this cantankerous old man.’ No doubt we did. But this is not the note to end on. In 1996, when Rupert was little short of 90 and some years after I had left Murray, I got a letter from him saying the kindest things about a book I had just compiled for the Folio Society covering his period of the 1890s. Even his death in 1999 did not bring things to a close because the following year I was approached by Murray to do a one-volume selection of the Letters. Rupert had been very dismissive at the end of the 1980s when Penguin wanted to do the same and at the time I’d apparently done another scribble to Jock Murray: ‘Obdurate fellow! He is letting the best be the enemy of the good.’ It was a tricky job, reducing them by something like two-thirds yet keeping the magic. Do I regret that he was not around to see the result? That’s a tricky one too. What I certainly don’t regret is having played a part in the publication of Rupert and George’s letters. They live on, and with luck those who might have been put off by the prospect of all six volumes have been converted by the Selected Letters.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Roger Hudson 2008